The Saturn‘s version of Bomberman is one of the best Bomberman games available, with perfect-bomb-dropping gameplay and beautiful, colourful 2D graphics that retain the look and feel of the Super Nintendo and PC Engine classics, but with a slightly modern twist. Well, modern for 1997, when Saturn Bomberman was first released.

Saturn Bomberman features a story mode that can be played with one or two-players, a battle mode that supports up to ten players simultaneously, and a master mode with speedruns and races for experts.

Gameplay is standard Bomberman style, with themed worlds to play in, each with a boss battle at the end. Touching enemies in the field will lose you a life, but you can protect yourself from them by riding friendly dinosaurs (that hatch from an eggs). You can also find and collect power-ups that increase your bomb range or the number of bombs you can drop at once.

To complete a screen you’ve got to destroy all the “Zarfs” (poles with red orbs on top) to get the exit to show. Upon successfully completing a level, Bomberman will do a victory pose, then part of the scenery will change allowing him through to the next level. This transition becomes the main visual gimmick of the game and ties all the levels together as you progress.

Boss battles are spectacular and challenging, and the learning curve through the story mode is gradual enough to make it easy to get into, but also difficult to put down. And that’s without even mentioning the multiplayer battle mode, which a whole other dimension to explore.

If you have a hankering for a good 2D Bomberman then you could do a lot worse than Saturn Bomberman. It has all the complexity and charm of the original Bomberman games, but with the added power of the Saturn for an extra layer of more modern special effects, and of course plenty of hidden secrets to uncover.

Saturn Bomberman is a must-own and must-play game on the Sega Saturn. It was developed by Hudson Soft in conjunction with Eleven, and was the twelfth Bomberman release in the series.

More: Saturn Bomberman on Wikipedia